ZOMBIE FORUMS

Okay, we were debating over the morality of laughing at a panty-sniffer whom none of us will probably encounter. Now, it has been revealed that said panty sniffer doesn't exist - he is a fiction. Now, for some reason, many of those who once opposed laughing at him now don't have a problem with it.

My question is: why is there a difference between laughing at bad things happening to fictional people, and laughing at bad things happening to real people whom you will never meet? The two are effectively equivalent, in my eyes. And if two actions produce the exact same result, and this result was intended, then they are morally equivalent.

Morality is not a matter of thought or feeling. Morality is based on action. You can sit on your ass and whine about starving children in Iraq; you could try to develop sympathy for them as well. But this has nothing to do with morality. It would only become a moral act if, based on these actions, you actually do something to improve their lives.

(Incidentally, I believe that the main problem with the modern left is that they whine too much and act too little. A good book related to this is "Achieving Our Country" by Richard Rorty. Rorty is a neo-pragmatist, and I agree with a lot of his philosophy. I don't entirely agree with him politically, but the book makes a lot of good, strong, valid points.)

Thus, morality is not a matter of developing "sympathy for everyone", although developing sympathy for those whose lives you can effect helps us to act morally. For example, I have sympathy for the Iraqi people. This is a good thing, because it means that I can be more easily motivated to try to change the situation they are under. However, even if the panty-sniffer existed, I could not change his life, no matter how much sympathy I developed for him. Therefore, sympathy for hypothetical something-awful-sister-panty-sniffers is an amoral (though not immoral) quality.

So, any comments on this?

I'll start by saying that my sudden laughter was at us, carrying on over the hypothetical panty sniffer's situation as if it was real, without any proof to substantiate it.

here we are, seasoned surfers of this intra-web thingy, thinking we know what the score is, some of us denouncing the person that called the guy's family, and others suggesting castration of the sniffer. and i at least fell for this one, hook line and sinker.

now, i still don't find the actual story funny, even though it's not real. why? it is concerning topics that i would normaly have a bit of a joke and a chuckle about. anyone who's been in the #en charoom should have witnessed one or two of my more 'dusturbing' lapses.

i think the reason i didn't laugh is the way the joke was delivered. it wasn't delivered in a way that i found humor in it, for some reason i can't quite pin down. which is odd, because when i saw the live footage of the twin towers one september morning, i laughed and said "woah, that looked pretty cool." and then went on to say how boring the next few months of television is going to be with all of the backlash and finger pointing and jumping up and down and screaming.

so, my morality lies on the entertaining/not entertaining part. Even though hypothetical, i couldn't find anything to laugh at. it looked like a person seriously concerned with a serious problem, and looking for a little genuine help, albeit in the wrong place, and getting shafted by a stranger.

If it had been portrayed with an ounce of humor in it, i might have seen the joke and laughed.

is laughing at other's misfortune wrong? i certainly hope not, i do it every day. i just didn't in this occasion.

i will say this though. while i do laugh at the misfortune of others, i also frequently joke about my misfortune openly. if you can't laugh at yourself, you are standing on shakey ground for laughing at others.

I like to look at it the Kantian way. If everyone laughed at everyone else, unless all human beings suddenly became more accepting of their own shortfalls, society would be worse off.

I'll be honest, I didn't read the panty sniffer thing. I looked at it, dismissed it as somewhat out of my range of humor, and went on my merry network bitching way. But, on morality:

mo·ral·i·ty ( P ) Pronunciation Key (m-rl-t, mô-)
n. pl. mo·ral·i·ties
The quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct.
A system of ideas of right and wrong conduct: religious morality; Christian morality.
Virtuous conduct.
A rule or lesson in moral conduct.

Ok... what I take from it is basically what I take on good and evil: each person has their own, and no one's morality of code of good/evil is necc. right. Some may be more complementary to others, but to say that something is "moral" or "morally right" is egotistical in assuming your morals are right. By all means, have a good discussion/debate with someone over how you view something, but don't try and "trump" them with morals, cause that's just bull.

-For further reference of what I see as moral/good/evil, refer to the "Definition of Evil," and no, I don't actually give my own personal def, because that is far too large for a forum post, nor is it any of your business accept to know that it includes the "my rights end at your face" mentality.

-Rae, the "rambling and insightful" (thank you clay..I think) Network Bitch

Ah, but I'm not talking about laughing at people I know. I'm talking about laughing at people I will never encounter, and thus, effectively don't exist for my purposes.

As for what Rae said, I agree wholeheartedly; morality is relative. However, some moralities tend to "work" better than others. This is partially dependant on the social/cultural setting, but still, some moralities tend to work within a certain context, and some don't.

The main reason I'm arguing about this, keep in mind, is the fact that Vaergoth said we were all going to hell for laughing at the panty-sniffer. I say we should only criticize others for actions that directly effect the world. In other words, I'm defining morality as something on whose basis you can criticize other people. The fact is that, like it or not, we have to pass moral judgments on people for society to function. As such, we should at least be criticizing the right things - i.e. the things that effect society.

I believe in finding humour in whatever you can, no one should be faulted for what they find humourous. It is one thing to laugh at it and feel no sympathy for the guy, it is quite another to find it funny and also feel sorry for his horrible predicament.

If you can put yourself in his situation and honestly say you would not feel bad in the least having that happen to you then you can laugh without needing to feel any sympathy. Otherwise you really need to revamp your value system.

That's all well and good, but no one is addressing my question: is sympathy for others a moral trait per se? I don't think it is, for the reasons I gave above.

I don't see sympathy as a subtrait/trait of morality. Simply put, because it's not universal. A person my see sympathy as completely immoral and scorn those who have it as weak (say, perhapes, a Spartan). Or there are people like me that see symapthy to be "amoral." If I am gonna have sympathy for someone, it will be because I don't think they brought whatever they is happening upon themselves. A person who is raped didn't ask to be raped, so I have sympathy. An idiot that would sniff his sister's panties I have no sympathy for because he did something stupid, and this brought his strife onto himself. For me, it isn't morality that govern's my sympathy, but instead my intolerance for stupid people.

-Rae the intolerant

Sidenote: I wrote this post while wearing full chainmail armor. Go being a forum addict in addition to a fighter.

Okay, once again your displaying your moral relativism. That's okay. I'm a moral relativist too, if you define moral relativism as the belief that no single morality is "true" or absolute. I think of moral systems the same way I think of taste in food: just as there's no objective basis in claiming that chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla, so too there's no objective basis for deciding which morality is "best". However, I DO think that some moralities work better than others and thus morality can be argued insofar as the effectiveness of the moral system in question is concerned. After all, you can like eating chocolate ice cream, you could like eating vanilla ice cream, or you could like eating feces. However, eating feces would NOT be a good idea, regardless of the fact that "chocolate ice cream tastes better than feces" is a totally arbitrary statement.

I think sympathy is separate from morals. Even if you have no morals whatsoever you can still feel sympathy for others (I would assume). Your morals change little about your sympathetic response. Morals that you develop on your own, not the ones forced upon children, are conscious decisions that you can control and alter. Sympathy is involuntary.

Frankly nothing disgusts me more than someone who is only has sympathy for people they like or know.

i would say, for me, sympathy doesn't have to be moral. i certainly don't think the hypothetical panty-sniffer did the right thing in sniffing his sister's panties, but what happened to him was bad and distressing. i can sympathize with that kind of distress and hurt very easily, if not the resons he suffered it.

it's easier to feel sympathy for someone when you have similar experiences or fears. which is why many people may have had the response of "sucker! freak!" instead of "that's shit luck, i know how yuo feel." because many others would then turn to the sympathizers and say "Freak! panty sniffer!" when the sympathy, and empathy that the person feels isn't for the guy's perversion, but for the trauma and distress of the situation it put him in.

anyone who's been the subject of wide-scale teasing and ostricization would likely feel empathy for such a predicament, because it summons up unpleasant memories for them.

"i remeber how that felt. it was really terrible. i sympathize with you."

this is a normal human reaction. in order to feel anything towards anyone, whether you have met them in person or not, you have to be able to connect with them somehow, otherwise they are just external stimuli, or 'entertainment'

haha, not bad for nearly 6 AM. i should go to bed.

I guess, then, morals would include whatever actions are "beneficial" to society as a whole. But then again, "beneficial" is right there in that same category as morals.
Maybe morals are just whatever a given party is able to agree are mutually beneficial.

No, sympathy doesn't appear to be a part of morality.

However, sympathy DOES, to me, at least appear to be an extension OF your morality.

You do not need sympathy to have a moral system. You DO, however, require morality of some kind to have sympathy for something.

Stating it in as clear terms as possible, of course. And hopefully, it makes sense.

EDIT: And, as an interesting debate, on a forum such as this, where your statements are in essence your actions, does this mean that by every post we make we define our morality, if Icy is right and morality only exists in the actions you take? But what if the actions we take here are diametrically opposed to those we take in real life? Which set of actions do we take as a basis for our morality?